The problems that Champlain faced in the court of the queen regent were similar in one way to those he had met in the councils of American Indians. To form an alliance with one group was to make an enemy of another. In both worlds, people cultivated elaborate rituals of politesse, but behind a screen of courtesy they fought constantly with one another in combats of unimaginable cruelty. In Champlain’s two worlds, some of the most dangerous people wore diamonds and brocade.
It was a time of crisis for Champlain’s cause, and the future of New France was very much in doubt. Many such moments came to Champlain in the course of his long and troubled career. Any one of them could have been fatal for his purposes. His responses were always the same. Opposition spurred Champlain to press onward. Danger awakened him to greater efforts. Defeat increased his determination to try again. He wrote later, “All this, I say, put new life into me, as it were, and redoubled my courage for the continuance of my labors in the exploration of New France.”15
At court, Champlain appears to have made no immediate effort to approach the queen directly. Instead he worked at cultivating relationships with three of the most powerful “Lords of the Court,” as he called them. One of these men was his former commanding officer Charles de Cossé, maréchal de Brissac, whom Henri IV had raised to high rank in 1594. Champlain consulted him on American affairs, and gained his help and advice at court.16
Once again, Champlain also sought out Pierre Jeannin, the respected president of the parlement in Burgundy. He had held high office under Henri IV as councillor and comptroller general of the king’s finances. Champlain called him “monsieur le président Jeannin,” and wrote that he was “a man who wished to see good enterprises flourish.” He was a man of learning and a humanist with a thirst for knowledge. In 1609, Lescarbot dedicated his history of New France to Jeannin, and celebrated him as a man who “loves great undertakings by sea and ocean.” In the words of historian W. L. Grant, Jeannin became a “special patron of geographers and explorers”—and of Champlain in particular.17
Champlain’s most powerful friend and advisor was Lord Chancellor Nicolas Brûlart, the marquis de Sillery, a man who tried to keep the peace at court and was held in high esteem for his wisdom and judgment. Champlain often consulted him on American afairs. He frequently appeared in the writings of Lescarbot and Champlain as a faithful friend of New France.18
In Paris from 1610 to 1611, Champlain also made an effort to build a strong base at court by another method. At the same time that he cultivated relations with members of the high nobility, he formed alliances with officials and administrators who ran the daily business of the state. Historian Victor Tapié writes that in the regency of Marie de Medici, “governmental methods and procedures remained as they were under the late king. With few exceptions, the personnel and the entire administration were the same, and a corps of royal officials continued to manage the business of government, but without the close direction that they had received from Henri IV.” This in some ways increased their power, and Champlain was keenly aware that they could make all the difference between success and failure for his plans.
In 1610, Champlain suddenly decided to take a wife, and his choice tells us something about his purposes. She was Hélène Boullé, the daughter of Nicolas Boullé. Her father was a Protestant who appears to have converted to Catholicism, a man of the high bourgeoisie in Paris, with a job at the very heart of the royal regime. He was referred to as monsieur le Contrôleur Boullé. His offices were variously called huissier des finances du roi, or huissier collecteur des finances, or secrétaire de la Chambre du Roi. At court, a huissier was an officer of rank, charged with carrying out executive decisions of the monarch. He was a man at the center of power in France. That position brought him wealth and influence, which was cemented by the marriages of his children. One of his daughters, Margaret Boullé, married Charles Deslandes, secretary to the prince de Condé, and linked the family to one of the most powerful men in France.19
Champlain was already a friend of the family. He had known Nicolas Boullé since the days of his military service in Brittany. Hélène Boullé’s brother Eustache had been his companion in Acadia, and served with him in the St. Lawrence Valley.20 Together these men arranged a marriage, with an elaborate contract and a generous dowry. Nicolas Boullé offered 6,000 livres, of which 4,500 was to be paid at the start. Champlain agreed in return to pay 1,800 livres a year for his wife’s support when he was out of the country.
Champlain was about forty years old in 1610; Hélène Boullé was barely twelve. She was so young that all of the contracting parties agreed that the marriage could not be consummated for two years. Hélène would continue to live in her parents’ home through that period and move to her husband’s home when she was fourteen.21
It was done in haste. The marriage contract was arranged on December 27, 1610, and required that the bride and groom were to “take each other in lawful wedlock within the briefest space of time possible.” The wedding followed three days later on December 30, 1610, in the church of Saint-Germain l’Auxerrois, which still stands in Paris facing the east end of the Louvre. It had been the parish church of Henri IV. The documents were signed by the king’s notaries and record keepers. We know from the list of witnesses that the ceremony was attended by many of the dead king’s personal attendants. His physician, apothecaries, and councillors were on the list. The sieur de Mons and leading Paris merchants were also present.22
This union cemented an alliance between Champlain and administrative figures at court. It also connected him with investors and financiers in the city of Paris. They could be a counterweight to merchants in the western seaports of Normandy and Brittany who might be unhappy with a commercial venture that was controlled by a colonizer. The marriage promised to help Champlain’s grand design in many ways.
Everyone appears to have been delighted, with one exception. The bride was bitterly unhappy. Even at the age of twelve, this spirited and headstrong young person was in a fury about her fate. Champlain showed no apparent concern for the feelings of the child who was forced to marry him against her will.
In Paris, while Champlain was working to strengthen his connections with court officials such as Nicolas Boullé, he also turned in another direction. During the regency of Marie de Medici, leaders of the Catholic Church were gaining power and influence in France. It was clear that Champlain had to win their approval for his project in America. He launched another campaign to rally support within the Church and its religious orders. This was uphill work. In Paris, clergy of all denominations looked unfavorably on a colony that had operated without a spiritual leader for several years. An expanding circle of Catholic leaders also wanted to banish all Protestants from New France, a move that would have excluded many seamen and settlers.
Champlain went to work and tried to build support among the lords spiritual of France: the cardinals and bishops, as well as the clergy, the heads of religious orders, and Catholic laymen. That effort began in 1610–11, and it was not an easy task. The complex structure of the Catholic Church in France presented a challenge. A great danger was fragmentation of effort and scattering of scarce resources.23
A case in point was an affair that started in 1610. It involved a small group of Jesuits and one of the most beautiful women in France. Henri IV had expelled the Jesuits in 1594, but they had survived in some provinces, and in 1603 the king relented. He formed a friendship with Pierre Coton, a very able Jesuit priest who became his confessor. Henri allowed the Jesuits to return, on condition that they must be native-born Frenchmen and swear an oath of loyalty to the Crown. It was part of a larger campaign by the king and later the queen regent to make peace with the major Catholic orders, and to encourage them to function in France, in the hope that “all nature’s difference, might keep nature’s peace.” Among the beneficiaries were Augustinians, Jesuits, Capuchins, and Franciscans such as the Récollet fathers. Most of these groups would play important roles in New France.24
Antoinette de Pons, marquise de Guercheville (1570–1632) was a woman of piety, wealth, and beauty—hotly pursued by Henri IV, but never caught. She devoted herself to Jesuit missions and became proprietress of Acadia. Champlain begged her to support a common effort in New France—another of his many failures.
One of these tales had involved King Henri IV himself, who was fascinated by Madame de Guercheville. She spurned his advances and retreated from the court to her château at La Roche-Guyon on the river Seine, thirty miles west of Paris. The king organized a hunting party near her château and sent a gentleman of the court to ask the marquise if he could spend the night. She replied that the king did her great honor and she would do her best to receive him. For the occasion she ordered a magnificent supper, illuminated her château with torches in every window, put on a beautiful gown covered with diamonds, and prepared to receive the king.26
Henri rode in from his hunt in high anticipation, and Madame de Guercheville came out to greet him, preceded by pages with torches, and surrounded by ladies and gentlemen of the neighborhood. The king found her “more beautiful than ever, in the shadows of the night, and the dancing light of flambeaux and her diamonds.” He said to her, “Is this really you, and am I the king you so dislike?” To his delight, she led him directly to her bedroom, opened the door, and then withdrew. The king thought she was going to arrange an intimate feast for them both. Then he heard her in the courtyard below, calling for her carriage. The king went running down the stairs after her and cried, “Quoi, madame? Am I driving you out of your own house?” She answered with great firmness, “Sire, a king should be master wherever he is. But as for me, I like to keep some little power in whatever poor places I find my self.” Without waiting for his reply, she climbed into her carriage and rode off to spend the night with a lady in the neighborhood. It was said that the king formed a high respect for her in the years that followed.27
The passion that Madame de Guercheville denied to the king was lavished upon the Church, and still more on the Society of Jesus and its many missions. Her religious advisor was a young Jesuit priest, Father Énemond Massé, a friend of Pierre Coton. After the death of Henri IV, she became the patroness and sponsor of Jesuit missions. Her particular interest turned to the conversion of the American Indians. A Jesuit scholar wrote that “the only difficulty … was to restrain her zeal within reasonable bounds.” She enlisted the queen regent and the marquise de Verneuil to her cause. The queen authorized 2,000 crowns, much of it raised by subscription from royal princesses and the ladies of Paris and Rouen.28
With Madame de Guercheville’s sponsorship and the support of the queen regent, in 1610, two Jesuit priests, Massé and Pierre Biard, were recruited to found a mission in America. Two Huguenot merchants of Dieppe, Du Jardin and Du Quesne, were hired to fit out a ship, but when they discovered that they were to carry two Jesuits, they refused to participate. The Jesuit leaders went to Madame de Guercheville. She bought the ship and supported the mission at a cost of 5,700 livres.29
The venture combined two purposes: piety and profit. The Jesuit contract authorized the priests to operate a fur trade from their missions, and Madame de Guercheville insisted that all profits should revert to the mission. The idea was to create what has been called an “Acadian Paraguay” in the Gulf of Maine, comparable to the South American country that was run by the Jesuits for many generations. The two Jesuit fathers, Massé and Biard, sailed for America on January 26, 1611, and suffered terribly on a long winter voyage. These were the first Black Robes in New France. The colony was called Saint-Sauveur, and it was planted on Mount Desert Island, perhaps at a beautiful and sheltered place on the western side of Somes Sound which is still called Jesuit Point.30
Madame de Guercheville also worked with the sieur de Poutrincourt and his son Biencourt de Poutrincourt for a time, but fell out with them over a question of land titles in America. She received an enormous grant of land in Acadia, as far south as Florida. Alarmed English leaders ordered its removal. Two years later, this French Jesuit colony was attacked and destroyed by an English force from Jamestown in Virginia. The English commander, Samuel Argall, had orders to evict the French, burn their settlements, and enforce England’s claim to what is now the coast of Maine.31
Champlain regarded these events with dismay. A very large sum had been lavished on the Jesuit colony at Saint-Sauveur, and it was a total loss. Champlain went to Father Coton two or three times, and urged him to join a common effort for a colony centered on the St. Lawrence River rather than in southern Acadia. The two men were unable to agree on terms. They differed over money, but even more over control. Champlain wrote that Coton wanted terms which “could not have been to the advantage of the sieur de Mons, and this was the reason why nothing was done, in spite of all I could urge upon this father.” He wrote that this enterprise was thwarted by many misfortunes which could well have been avoided at the start if Madame de Guercheville had given 3,600 livres to the sieur de Mons, who wished to have the settlement at Quebec. The lost colony of Saint-Sauveur on Mount Desert Island never revived. Its history revealed the troubles that afflicted New France and Champlain in the regency of Marie de Medici after the death of Henri IV.32
In all these ways, Champlain struggled through the dark years from 1610 to 1612. Lacking direct access to the queen regent, he had succeeded in organizing several centers of support: from his old American circle, from friends in the city, and from an expanding network of royal officials at court. But he had failed with the religious orders and their patroness, Madame de Guercheville.
Still, he kept at it. His elaborate efforts to broaden the base of his American project were shaped by the structure of power in France. By comparison with the empire of New Spain, French colonies in America began as experiments in mixed enterprise. Champlain needed the support of the Crown, the Catholic Church, its monastic orders, great nobles, ministers, court officials, provincial parlements, towns, courts of law, merchants, commercial companies, lawyers, and others. A major difficulty from the start was the division of power in France, fragmentation of control, and tangled lines of authority. Even in small matters he had to win the backing of many people at home. And at the same time, he kept an eye on events in North America. In the early months of 1611 Champlain turned again in that direction.
14.
TRANSATLANTIC TRIALS
Champlain’s Shuttle Diplomacy, 1611–15
He left to me the task of finding the ways and means of keeping New France and laid upon me the entire responsibility for it.
—Samuel de Champlain on de Mons, 16111
WHILE CHAMPLAIN STRUGGLED in France, the infant settlement at Quebec was surrounded by danger. Every Canadian winter was a mortal challenge to its habitants. Every spring brought more traders and fishermen who saw the habitants as rivals and their leaders as regulators. Merchant-capitalists regarded a permanent settlement as a folly. English neighbors perceived it as a threat.
Even to its friends, the future of Quebec seemed very doubtful in 1611. Little was known about the interior of New France. It was laced with great waterways, but where did they lead? It was blessed with resources, but how could they be exploited? It was inhabited by many Indian nations who outnumbered the small European settlements, but to become a friend of one was to make an enemy of another.
It was typical of Champlain to seek a solution in growth. His primary purpose was to broaden the base of support for New France on both sides of the Atlantic. In America he planned to enlarge the base for New France by building more alliances with Indian
nations to the west. He was thinking in particular of the Huron nation, whom he called the Good Iroquois, and also of the many Algonquin nations northwest of Montreal. Everything hinged on communication. To help with that task Champlain recruited more young men for his “corps of interpreters,” both Indians and Europeans. One of them was a Huron named Savignon, who had spent a year in France. Another was a Frenchman named Nicolas de Vignau, who had been sent to live among the northern Indians.2
• • •
To succeed with these plans, Champlain was compelled to shuttle back and forth across the ocean, moving rapidly from one opportunity to the next. It was a hard trial for transatlantic leadership. The growing number of his Atlantic crossings was a measure of the magnitude of his leadership. Their timing was another sign of stress. Increasingly he had to make his voyages in difficult seasons of the year, even in midwinter.
In February, 1611, Champlain organized a voyage with the help of Thomas and Lucas Le Gendre, merchants of Rouen with long experience in overseas trade and a strong relationship with the sieur de Mons. They were silent supporters of New France. Without them, Champlain could not have functioned in these lean years. Thomas Le Gendre capitalized the voyage as a trading venture, and “came himself to Honfleur, to oversee the outfitting of the voyage.” Somehow Champlain also recruited “several artisans” for Quebec, and purchased supplies for another precarious year.3
He sailed from Honfleur on March 1, 1611. It was one of his earliest crossings—a winter passage on the stormy North Atlantic, and it nearly killed him. At sea his little ship met heavy winter gales that forced him north of his usual track. Champlain wrote that “contrary winds from the south-southwest and west-northwest … drove us as far as latitude 42 degrees, without being able to make a southing.” One can only imagine what life was like on his small vessel, rising and plunging in dark gray seas with white water streaming from her deck. Champlain wrote that they were able to advance only with “much pain and labor, by going from one tack and another in order to take our direct line.”4
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